Author: Matt Whitlock 2014-03-29 08:54:03
Published on: 2014-03-29T08:54:03+00:00
In a conversation between Matt Whitlock and Tamas Blummer on March 29, 2014, the latter proposed using Shamir's Secret Sharing to decompose a seed for a BIP32 master key, which could be more future relevant than a single key. Blummer suggested adapting the BIP for a length typically used of 16 or 32 bytes and having a magic code to indicate its use as key versus seed. Whitlock replied that master keys of 32 bytes would work as ordinary private keys are also 32 bytes. Secrets of other lengths could be supported if the function that generates a[i] from a[i-1], which is presently SHA-256, were replaced with a function having parameterized output length, such as scrypt. However, secrets greater than secp256k1_N could not be supported because the modular arithmetic would destroy them. Any secret smaller than 256 bits would be fine.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T17:14:03.293662+00:00